“I Wear A Size 8 And Not Pretty: Why Your Standard of Beauty Depends on You” : Over 18k Shares and Counting!

I remember sitting down in my then-boyfriend’s kitchen one bright Sunday afternoon because I was sick and tired of seeing every piece of clothing I tried on from a mannequin display make me look like actual garbage.

It wasn’t me, in hindsight: it was the clothes. It was the mismatched seams, it was the way they didn’t count for an ounce of body fat, it was the way the mannequin curved in her plastic hips that showed how the blouse was really supposed to lay. My womanly body was simply not a candidate for what this fashion designer had in mind at the time of creation.

And that was okay, but it was the catalyst for my first successful article on the world wide web. It was the first article that granted me the opportunity to be flooded (and I mean FLOODED) with messages and stories of bravery and courage from young girls to women of every age (and beautiful, beautiful size) sharing their own personal and sometimes scrutinizing journey. This article was even tweeted out by actress, Sophia Bush, allowing me for the first time in my life to see how this article ignited itself in the Twitter-verse. To this day, I still receive fan mail for this article with women everywhere thanking me for putting to rest their nasty, self-loathing thoughts.

This was two years ago and the article still gives me chills. The fashion industry, even within the past two years has made a tremendous turn around and I hope and pray that the status of the “perfect physique” begins to burn and eventually obliterate. We can thank icons like Tess Holiday and Ashley Graham and even most recently the Anti-Victoria Secret’s Fashion Show in NJ created and hosted by sisters, Alyse and Alexis Scaffidi (who I actually went to high school with!) who completely slammed society’s standard of “real beauty” by having women of ALL types of beauty strut their stuff down the runway.

I hope that this article continues to make waves and be a catalyst for women on their journey to truly understanding what self-love entails. Self love encompasses all those “flaws” we used to hate about ourselves and finding the compassion within ourselves to wake up every morning and share in the ability to say, “I may not have the greatest legs on the planet, but I’ll be damned if they aren’t what make me the most beautiful woman out there.”